Over the past decade, India has been central to debates on democracy. Many viewed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) underperformance in the 2024 election as a sign of democratic resilience. This essay argues instead that it signaled further backsliding in the country’s most vulnerable dimension of democracy — its liberal democracy. The election reinforced a troubling status quo for India’s largest religious minority: explicit exclusion from one side of the political spectrum and strategic silence from the other. These dual forces leave Indian Muslims in a political bind, further constraining their prospects for political inclusion.
How and when can religious times become focal points for communal violence? In the context of Hindu-Muslim riots in India, I argue that incompatible ritual holidays where one religion's rituals are at odds with another (e.g. sacrificing cows or engaging in processions with idolatry) help explain the positive effect of sacred time on religious rioting. Holidays with incompatible rituals provide doctrinal differences that make riots more likely. These types of holidays can be used by riot entrepreneurs to incite violence or can independently raise an individual's willingness to engage in violence. I provide support for this argument by analyzing data on Hindu-Muslim riots across 100 years. I investigate the mechanisms through additional analysis and examining historical and present-day cases of riots that occurred on holidays. By focusing on the content of religion, this paper demonstrates how particular religious holidays can provide the underlying conditions that elites use to incite religious violence.
States worldwide use facial recognition technology (FRT) to assist in policing citizens, monitoring public goods, and even running elections. This article asks how FRT in polling stations affects voter turnout. Existing research on technology in elections offer ambiguous predictions for the direction and magnitude of the effect. I leverage a state-run randomized pilot of FRT in local elections in a municipality in Telangana, India to show that polling stations with FRT have lower turnout compared to those without. I discuss how three possible mechanisms might explain this effect: logistical issues, shifts in fraudulent activity, and apprehension about government surveillance particularly among marginalized citizens. Given the small sample of this pilot, the findings should be viewed as suggestive but indicative of the need for future research on the consequences that new technologies in governance can have on citizens in democracies.
Working Papers
The Representation Trap: How and Why Muslims Struggle to Maintain Power in India. [Abstract] (Revised and Resubmitted)
Awards: Sage Best Paper Award, APSA Comparative Politics Section (2023); Best Paper Award, APSA Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section (2023); Weber Best Paper Award, APSA Religion and Politics Section (2023); Kenneth D. Wald Best Graduate Student Paper Award, APSA Religion and Politics Section (2023); Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award, APSA Democracy and Autocracy Section (2023); Kellogg/Notre Dame Award, Best Paper in Comparative Politics, MPSA (2024); Richard E. Matland Award, Best Paper on Representation, Elections, or Voting, MPSA (2024)
The representation of minority and marginalized groups in politics is critical for inclusive democracy. This article contends that minority political power can have unintended negative consequences by shifting the role of identity in political behavior. I argue that when minorities gain power, it can divide the minority group and consolidate the dominant group. I study the combination of these processes, termed the representation trap, through a mixed-methods examination of Muslims in India, the world’s largest democracy. Analyses of election results and original survey data show that the election of a Muslim representative divides Muslim votes across an increased number of coethnic candidates and consolidates Hindu votes for the majoritarian party in the subsequent election. Qualitative evidence and a pre-registered vignette experiment demonstrate that Hindus consolidate due to the mobilization of their dominant group identity and Muslims divide due to the activation of within-group sub-identities. This work highlights how power can differentially structure the way identity affects voting behavior for minority and dominant groups.
Increasing Polarization of Hindu-Muslim Identity in India. [Abstract] (with Viktor Enssle, Tanushree Goyal, Saad Gulzar, and Gufran Pathan)
We document the long-term evolution of religious identity in India by analyzing the names of 505 million Hindus and Muslims born between 1950 to 1995. We find that names increasingly signal a strong religious identity, showing heightened religious polarization. A preference for religious doctrine does not explain this rising polarization. Instead, we show how social dynamics generate asymmetric behaviors. First, Muslims are less likely to adopt Hindu names over time, while Hindus rarely use Muslim names. Second, polarization for Hindus is rooted in parents giving their children more distinct names than their own, while for Muslims, neighborhood factors such as segregation shape polarization. Going beyond accounts of rising religious fundamentalism in India, our findings highlight the differential social roots of Hindu and Muslim cultural practices.
How Discretion Shapes Civil Society-Opposition Party Alliances Against Democratic Backsliding. [Abstract] (with Pratik Mahajan)
Democratic backsliding weakens both civil society organizations (CSOs) and opposition parties. CSOs face repression, funding cuts, and constraints on traditional activism; opposition parties lose local organizational depth and confront skewed electoral competition. These dual constraints create incentives for political collaboration between the two, but also impose costs. Each actor must retain autonomy, preserve its core identity, and maintain credibility with its base. We argue that these actors navigate their mutual vulnerability through a discretionary alliance: a strategic, selective relationship where each seeks support without full alignment. CSOs engage in partisan mobilization but vary their intensity based on whether opposition candidates align with their organizational mission. In turn, opposition parties seek CSOs with community legitimacy and overlapping goals, while remaining cautious about over-identifying with outside actors. We demonstrate this dynamic through two paired, pre-registered conjoint experiments in India. The first, with 730 representatives from 153 CSOs, shows that CSOs temper the intensity of their electoral engagement when candidate profiles diverge from their mandates. The second, with 736 opposition party workers, reveals that parties prefer CSO allies who combine clear partisan signals with embeddedness in strategically important communities. We triangulate these findings with interviews and 62 days of ethnographic shadowing of CSO-party collaboration during a state election campaign in India to demonstrate the dynamics of such collaboration in practice. Together, our results conceptualize the CSO-party relationship under democratic backsliding as a discretionary alliance that is distinct from both disengagement and blind partisanship: initiated due to democratic constraints, shaped by organizational autonomy, and sustained by strategic calibration.
The Promise and Limits of Leader-Driven Grassroots Campaigns. [Abstract] (with Resuf Ahmed)
Opposition parties across contexts have struggled against populist parties at the ballot box. Populist parties often brand the opposition as elite and out of touch with citizens. Over time, as populists amass power, they can further tilt electoral politics in their direction. How can the opposition respond? We examine the opposition’s use of leader-driven grassroots campaigns as an electoral strategy against populists. These campaigns directly address the unique weaknesses that the opposition faces against populists by reaching voters directly and improving the party’s image. We analyze the electoral impact of these efforts by studying the Indian National Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s 150-day grassroots march, the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Using newly collected state and national election data and a difference-in-differences design, we find that the yatra improved Congress’s electoral performance; however, in a spatially and temporally limited way. Interview and descriptive evidence explains how these campaigns help the opposition party change their narrative against populists and an original phone survey of 3500 voters reveals that those who directly participated in the grassroots campaign experienced longer-term positive impacts. Taken together, the findings highlight both the potential and the constraints of leader-driven grassroots campaigns as a strategy for opposition parties facing powerful populist incumbents
Works in Progress
The Perils of Power: How Minority Representation Shapes Identity and Politics in India. (book project, tentative title)
This book project is based on my doctoral dissertation, which received the Gabriel A. Almond Award (2024) for the best dissertation in comparative politics, the Juan Linz Prize (2024) for the best dissertation in the comparative study of democracy, and the Best Fieldwork Award (2024) from the APSA Democracy and Autocracy section.
Book manuscript workshop held in March 2025. Preparing for Submission.
Top-Down Representation: How Coethnicity Across Levels Promotes Minority Inclusion in India. (with Rahul Verma)
When Civil Society Overreaches: Voter Aversion to Expansive Civil Society Electoral Mobilization. (with Pratik Mahajan)
Marriage, Conversion, and Majority-Minority Conflict in Colonial Burma.
Other Writings
Mapping Muslim Voting Behavior in India. February 2024. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [India Election 2024 Series] [Republished in the Hindustan Times]
Decoding Bharat Jodo Yatra’s impact on Karnataka elections. May 2023. Hindustan Times. (with Resuf Ahmed) [Link]
Using IOM Flow Monitoring Data to Describe Migration in West and Central Africa. (with Darin Christensen, Guy Grossman, and Jeremy M. Weinstein) [Report] [Coverage in The Economist]
Book Review of Mass Religious Ritual and Intergroup Tolerance: The Muslim Pilgrims’ Paradox. Nationalities Papers. 2019. [Link]